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How Ontario can fight sexual assault on campus

For decades students have been making recommendations for how the province can tackle the problem of on-campus sexual assaults. It’s time for Queen’s Park to listen.

Queen’s University recently launched a sexual assault protocol for students, following a Star investigation into how schools tackle the issue of sexual violence on campus. The move was part of a trend that presents a rare opportunity to make progress on the issue, suggests Anna Goldfinch. (Randy Risling / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

By Anna Goldfinch

Thu., March 5, 2015

One in every five women attending a North American university or college is sexually assaulted. When you look around a lecture hall and do the math, it’s scary to think of how many of my classmates are part of this statistic.

For years, students have been working on this issue: engaging in consent education, setting up support services and convincing administrators of the need for better policies, procedures and awareness about sexual assault on campus.

Suddenly, it’s hard to find a news source in the country that hasn’t covered sexual assault. The issue has been splashed across front pages, treated as though it was a scandal uncovered.

Recent media attention on dentistry students at Dalhousie University, chants promoting rape at Saint Mary’s University and the University of British Columbia, as well as incidents at the University of Ottawa have led to unprecedented public dialogue about sexual assault on campus. These discussions have picked up real political traction, on our campuses and at Queen’s Park.

But the problem is by no means new. Students have long been fighting to make campuses safer; for over 30 years, the Canadian Federation of Students, the country’s largest and oldest student organization has been co-ordinating the No Means No campaign, which challenges rape culture and promotes consent.

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To understand how deep the problem runs, it’s useful to know that No Means No has met significant opposition at every turn. In fact, full-fledged counter-campaigns have been launched against it. In 2007, Bluenotes, a popular Canadian clothing retailer was selling “No Means Have Another Drink” t-shirts until the Canadian Federation of Students legally intervened. It’s a deeply unsettling fact that not everyone has wanted to confront the problem of sexual assault on campus.

However, we seem to have found ourselves in a pivotal moment, a time when politicians, media outlets and even college and university administrators are finally agreeing with student activists. This moment has propelled universities and colleges to finally start getting serious about adopting sexual assault policies, and has the premier of our province promising to roll out an aggressive policy approach to combating the problem.

So what should that approach involve? After all, eliminating sexual assault on campus, let alone in Ontario, is no short order.

First, we have to agree that we’re not just fighting to reduce the individual instances of sexual assault. We’re fighting a culture that exists throughout our society, including in our post-secondary institutions: rape culture.

Rape culture on campus looks like first-responders suggesting that a survivor was assaulted because she was drinking. Rape culture is the seeming ubiquity in our schools of private online conversations about sexually assaulting young women. Rape culture creates an environment that normalizes the covering-up of sexual assault or treating it like no big deal. It creates an environment where authorities and the media too often absolve perpetrators of blame, claiming boys will be boys and the survivor shouldn’t have been wearing such a short skirt.

Acknowledging the existence of rape culture is the first step in identifying a strategy to combat sexual violence. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet; only a holistic approach will start changing things on our campuses:

We need mandatory consent education to ensure that students understand that any sexual interaction without consent is considered sexual assault.

We need policies designed by students and stakeholders so that if a student does experience sexual assault, they know what options they have.

We need mechanisms to hold colleges and universities accountable to these policies.

We need funding available to ensure we have strong support systems in place on our campuses.

To accomplish this, Ontario desperately needs a government division dedicated to fighting sexual assault on campus. This division ought to take stock of existing policies, develop standards for tracking and reporting on sexual assaults, and directly oversee and enforce sexual assault policy compliance.

Students understand the need for these steps; we’ve understood it for over 30 years. We’ve made these exact recommendations to administrators, members of provincial parliament, even the premier. It’s time the rest of the province got on board.

Anna Goldfinch is the Ontario Representative of the Canadian Federation of Students, representing over 350,000 college and university students in the province.

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